Herald Blogs

For a miniseries about the construction of a church, The Pillars of the Earth is one unholy affair. It's got arson, rape, torture, witchcraft, incest, urophilia, mutilation, infanticide, regicide, genocide and what I believe to be the first TV prison escape built around baby poop.

In short, it's a whale of a lot of fun.

Based on Ken Follett's gazillion-selling 1989 novel, this eight-hour miniseries is an exercise in delicious depravity and titillating treachery. Even the good guys are perfidious swine when they need to be, which is practically always. Read my full review in Thursday's Miami Herald.

When Jimmy Johnson was football coach at the University of Miami, he told its president to go to hell -- and survived. After coaching the Dallas Cowboys, he mocked the owner for getting a face-lift, compared him to Michael Jackson -- and survived.

Now he's going to Nicaragua as a contestant on the TV show Survivor.

I'm betting on Nicaragua.

Several news outlets reported Wednesday that the 67-year-old Johnson is leaving his fishing boat in the Keys for San Juan del Sur, the beachside town in southern Nicaragua where production of the 21st season of Survivor started earlier this month.

Johnson is a total Survivor geek who never misses an episode and has been trying to make the cast for a couple of years now. He almost succeeded in 2008, but missed the final cut when a physical turned up arterial blockage. Two years later and 30 pounds lighter, he's succeeded.

Good for you, Jimmy. But I've been writing about Nicaragua for a quarter of a century, and I can tell you it's no country for old men, or young men, or men with all their marbles.

It's got wars and volcanoes and hurricanes. It's got vampire bats, for heaven's sake, not to mention loathsome little micro-organisms that would make you throw up if I even told you about them, much less if they got into your gastrointestinal tract. When the first Spanish conquistadores arrived 500 years ago, they nervously sent word home that they had discovered the very mouth of Hell. Read my full column on Johnson's impending doom at the hands of Nicaragua in Thursday's Miami Herald.

Did CBS consider firing Katie Couric last spring, a year before her contract expires? New York magazine says so. We've been reading Couric buyout stories for three years now, and yet there she still sits in the CBS anchor chair. So who knows? But it certainly seems clear that the Age of Couric is staggering toward its end, if it ever really began. Four years after she took over the CBS Evening News, it remains sunk in third place, with fewer viewers than ever. That's not entirely her fault, but the fact remains that CBS can finish third just as easily with a $3 million a year anchor as with a $15 million a year anchor. Soon, it will.

This is not, strictly speaking, a television item. But to accomodate the large number of Changing Channels readers who are Australians or zombies -- we go for a diverse demographic here -- I feel compelled to draw attention to this story from the Hollywood Reporter:

TORONTO -- L.A. Zombie, a Canadian indie film described by the Melbourne International Film Festival as "gay zombie porn," has been denied an Australian festival berth by local censors.

The banning decision followed a viewing of the Bruce LaBruce film by the Australian Film Classification Board, which concluded that implied sex with corpses as alien zombies range across Los Angeles for dead bodies and gay sex breaches local taste standards.

You can read more -- so very much more, including a discussion of gay zombie porn prosthetics, a description of the precise sexual behavior of gay zombies that would do Masters and Johnson proud, not to mention Bruce LaBruce's passionate explanation of why his film isn't truly porn --here.

Unless you've got DirecTV satellite service, you can say goodbye to legal drama Damages. The show, which was just nominated for five Emmys (including a best dramatic actress bid for Glenn Close) is leaving FX and will only air on DirecTV. And unlike Friday Night Lights, which airs on DirecTV first and then repeats on NBC, Damages will be seen only on satellite.

The deal, announced Monday, begins in 2011 and extends for two seasons. Damages drew decent ratings when it debuted on FX in 2007, but by the season that ended this April was pulling less a million viewers per episode.

Ever since the series Mad Men went on the air in 2007, I've wondered if it drew any of its material or inspiration from a book called From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. The madcap memoir of an advertising executive named Jerry Della Femina, the book was published in 1970 and must have spent a year or more on the bestseller lists; I saw it every time I entered a bookstore in those days and must have read half of it during a thousand and one browsing sessions. Just a teenager, I couldn't imagine shelling out $6.95 for a hardback book.

Over the past weekend, I learned the answer to my question is, yes, the book helped inform Mad Men. My source is Della Femina himself, writing in a new introduction to From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. It's just been republished by Simon & Schuster, which -- swag alert -- sent me a free copy. (That spared me the mind-blowing irony of paying more than twice as much for a paperback version of the hardback I thought was insanely overpriced at $6.95.)

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harboris as paranoid and as funny as I remembered it (the title comes from a pitch Della Femina suggested during a listless meeting about why his agency's efforts on behalf of Panasonic), provided you have a strong stomach for the slurs that were the ethnic and gender state of the union 40 years ago. Possibly the most instructive bit in the whole book is Della Femina's account of the strategy his fledgling agency employed when it was down to the last few dollars in its bank account. Firing the receptionist was out of the question, he writes, because what if a prospective client called and a man answered the phone?

Of course, some things have stayed the same. Recalling his lone foray into political advertising, Della Femina recounts his conversations with the handlers of Arlen Specter, then a Philadelphia prosecutor running for mayor of Philadelphia. "What's Arlen Specter for?" Della Femina asked. ""Arlen Specter is for getting elected," the handlers replied. Della Femina tried again: "All right, what's Arlen Specter against?" Replied the handlers: "Arlen Specter is against losing." If only more Pennsylvania voters had read From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, they could have saved themselves several decades worth of political sidestepping.

The Pillars of the Earth (10 p.m Friday, Starz) -- Quite an oddity that spy novelist Ken Follet's bestselling book of all time is a historical novel about 12th century religious architecture. Even more of an oddity: that a book that sold 14 million copies took 21 years to find its way to the screen. Here it is at last, an eight-hour miniseries starring Ian McShane, Donald Sutherland and a cast of zillions.

Dogs vs. Cats (8 p.m. Saturday, Animal Planet) -- In an attempt to settle the age-old dispute between these two (or, at least, their human owners), this show stages competitions on friendship, athleticism, cuteness, history, cleanliness, intelligence and cost. I dunno who wins, but I'm betting both cats and dogs outscore network TV programmers in every category.

Being Human (10 p.m. Saturday, BBC America) -- This funny, heartbreaking and sometimes terrifying series about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost yearning to reclaim their humanity returns for a second season and you're flat-out crazy if you don't watch: It's the best TV show of the summer.

Nobody's saying who blinked or how much, but late Thursday night Rainbow Media struck a deal with AT&T U-Verse over fees for the AMC, IFC and WE channels. So Don Draper can relax and have another Old Gold: AT&T U-Verse customers won't miss the debut of Mad Men later this month after all.